Tag: niche

Windows NT on the Nintendo Gamecube & Wii

I had a bad fall from a bike a few days ago and my arm is still really weak, which has affected how much typing I can put into these posts. Still, I am getting better, and so here’s two videos of people installing Windows NT 4.0 to Nintendo consoles, using an ISO of the install CD and tools and information posted here, and in the Gamecube’s case some hardware mods.

This kind of hack isn’t of the type like people claiming to “install” Windows to a Nintendo DS, but in fact are using DOSbox running on the DS. They get a bit of credit for coming up with a clever solution, but it’s not running on the metal, in the parlance. This is about actually running literal Microsoft NT on the actual Nintendo Gamecube/Wii, with no emulation layers or similar shenanigan interposed between.

The first one is from “Spawn Wave,” who has the Bright Young Broadcaster style to his video, meaning, his records from a dark room of equipment, his camera close to his face, he speaks loudly and squeezes in that like and/or subscribe prompt early, and generally tries to impress personality into his video. Mind, I don’t think all of this has to be bad, and Spawn Wave is a lot less obnoxious than many other YouPotatoes I’ve seen. There’s a blessed lack of sound effects or swoopy editing. His video’s only nine minutes long, so if you’re pressed for time, this is the one to watch.

I tend to prefer videos more like Michael MJD’s overview, which is also much longer at 31 minutes. He’s installing on a Wii, which is more powerful and performs better, and doesn’t need hardware mods. His is of the Hands Intruding From Offscreen school of video, but he’s more laid-back, and with that much time can fit more information without having to squeeze it in. This is better for people wanting to positively luxuriate in the process of installing NT4 to systems not intended for it.

The question of why, oh why, someone would do this, must remain unanswered. Some people just like making computers do weird things. It’s an odd form of entertainment, but entirely valid. Now, when will someone get Linux running on CoreWar?

7DRL 2025

It got by me this year, but the now 20-year-old 7 Day Roguelike Challenge, a gamejam where people try to construct a complete roguelike within a week’s time, finished up Saturday.

Not only has it been around a long time, but a number of games have come out of it that went on to greater things. Jupiter Hell got its start as a 7DRL project called DoomRL. The amazing Jeff Lait has made a ton of 7DRLs, and many of them have some awesome twist, like a game where you can make portals, but where the portals result in the world through them being rotated and possibly allowing you to get mixed up!

Jeff Lait’s Jacob’s Matrix

There’s regular several very interesting games in the challenge each year! Its itch.io page is here. This year’s theme was, simply, “roguelike,” and 819 people have joined it so far! I can’t wait to see what they’ve made!

Matt Sefton Remembers Maboshi’s Arcade

Mat Sephton, aka gingerbeardman (Mastodon, Bluesky), creator of a GotY Playdate game, spent some time tracking down the origins of MaBoShi, aka Maboshi’s Arcade, one of the most unique and distinctive independently-made WiiWare games. He blogged about it back in 2013 (anna anthropy did so too back then). Since then there have been DS and iOS remakes of the games, although they all lack a special gimmick of the WiiWare version.

(Aside: did you know that I believe very strongly in the power of hyperlinks? You should too!)

The arcade hosts three games, and they all would have been terrific on their own. My favorite is the Snake variant, a genuinely novel take on the concept and the one I’ve gotten the furthest in. But the cool thing about the Wii version is that up to three players can play at one. Each plays their own games and has independent progression, but intriguingly, their games are not entirely separate. Things that one player does in their game can affect, either positively or negatively, the events in adjacent games. Even if you don’t play with other people, random attract mode games will start up on adjacent screens, and provide a bit of variety to your game.

All three games are demonstrated, on Wii, in the following video (18m). Just watching it makes me want to dig out the Wii U where my own bought copy of the game lives and play another round of Square.

C64 Demo: NINE by Iftkryo

The demoscene is a rich source of awesome, and at times ridiculous, imagery and sounds. Once in a while we sift through it to find things to entertain you with.

On Youtube, some Commodore 64 observers have been in a bit of a tizzy examining a new demo by Iftkryo, called NINE (3m).

If you don’t know anything about the computer, it might not seem too interesting. A block-graphics wizard lifts his hat and out comes nine large digits in different colors that then float around the screen.

The more you know about the Commodore 64, though, the more interesting it is. The machine’s graphics chip, the VIC II, is can only display eight hardware sprites at once. Then the sprites cluster together on the same scanline, meaning ordinary multiplexing can’t be happening. Then they drift up into the upper boarder. It demonstrates complete mastery of the hardware, doing a lot of things that simply shouldn’t be possible.

Iftkryo has produced a video giving away his secrets, closely explaining how the demo does its magic (22m):

It’s a good exploration of a number of weird C64 graphics tricks: sprite multiplexing of course, opening up the side and top boarders, and making productive use of mysterious graphics that appear off the top of the screen if the boarder is gone. While little code is shown, it’s definitely on the more technical end of things we present here. I’d give it a four out of five on Drebnar’s Geekiness Scale. But if you like learning about obscure tech details of a forty-year-old computer? And who doesn’t? There it is!

Gamefinds: CSS Puzzle Box

We love it when we find weird and unique indie games to tell you all about! Our alien friends to the left herald these occasions.

Some of you may remember seeing, from a while ago, a clever hack that implemented a series of interactive puzzles on a website. If you didn’t see it, or don’t know much about how these things usually work, you might not think much of that, we’ve all been playing web games for two decades now, and an entire web platform for them (Flash) has arisen and died in that time. It now has an updated version, with new puzzles to figure out!

CSS Puzzle Box 2.0, starting state

Nowadays these things tend to be made using Javascript, or some language that renders down to Javascript. That’s what makes the CSS Puzzle Box amazing: it doesn’t use Javascript! It’s implemented entirely with HTML tags and CSS! See for yourself! Caveat: it doesn’t work on mobile platforms, some of the click or drag handles are a little hard to hit with your clumsy human finger. On desktop browsers, watching for the cursor to change when it’s over an interactive element is tremendously helpful.

It’s challenging, but far from impossible. It requires some close observation to get started, but after that you can probably get through it with enough time spent and effort expended. The hardest puzzle is one of the first, “Lights On,” one of those puzzles where clicking on a square inverts that light and those adjacent. You can follow these directions (swapping off lights for on ones) to solve it, or click on the O in the Lights On title a few times to skip it, or just muddle through—if you get stuck with just one or two lights on and can’t clear them, mess up the puzzle by clicking everywhere on it randomly and try again, and eventually you’ll happen on a pattern that resolves nicely.

So, about the technical underpinnings. Its creator blackle mori (Mastodon) wrote up a nice breakdown of how it manages to do what it does without scripting. Part of it includes the <details> tag and its accompanying <summary> tag, a way in pure HTML to have collapsing content. If you want to know the tricks there they are, but you don’t have to care about that to enjoy the puzzles. Good luck!

CSS Puzzle Box 2.0 by blackle mori (webgame)

Balatro University Explains “naneinf” And How To Reach It

How do you reach an impossible score, so high that the counting system malfunctions and vomits up gibberish?

Everyone’s hooked on Balatro, the deck builder where the deck you build is made, not of nonsense cards with wizards on them, but basic types like Aces and Jacks. You start with a deck of 52 cards and try to make an increasingly valuable set of poker hands, but you can get Jokers that change the rules, Tarot cards that let you replace or remove cards from your deck, and can outright buy new cards to put in. Buy you can also mod your cards to be worth more, or multiply your score. You can advance your hands so they’re more valuable, and make secret hands like Five of a Kind.

The ultimate goal of Balatro is to reach 100,000 chips in one round, a goal that seems impossible when the first round sees you struggling to make 300. But 100,000 isn’t the end, it keeps scaling past that in its “Endless Mode” where Ante goal requirements can increase by a factor of 20 or more.

But Endless Mode has an end. Balatro uses Lua’s math routines to handle its goal and chip counters, and if either gets too high it loses track, throws up its hands and calls it “naneinf,” a value that always compares false, and so is useless to get and can’t be reached. This score is so big that written out entirely it’d have over 308 digits.

The channel Balatro University covers many aspects of the game, and they have a new 28-minute video where they explain what the word means (it’s “nan e inf,” or “Not a Number raised to the power of 10 times Infinity”) and the six specific ways to reach it. I’m afraid that people who aren’t already soaked in the details of the game might not get much out of it, it’s made for addicts and uses game terms without explaining them, but it might be interesting to visit that world for a bit, and let the weirdness wash over you.

6 Degrees of Roguelikes to Enjoy

The weekly showcases highlight the many games we check out on the channel. Games shown are either press keys, demos, or from my collection. Reach out if you would like me to look at your game.

0:00 Intro
00:14 Terracards
2:26 Lucky Mayor
4:09 Aetheris
6:22 Rogue Labyrinth
7:57 Alien Frontier
9:14 Zero Sievert

Thrilling Tales of Old Videogames: FF vs D&D

Thrilling Tales of Old Videogames is one of the better game-related blogs out there, and their new post on how freely the first Final Fantasy cribbed from Dungeons & Dragons, and how that’s affected later games that have had to reckon with the changing legal landscape, is pretty darn interesting.

One of the facts represented is that, while D&D has always borrowed heavily from myth and literature for its beasties, Hasbro considers certain specific monsters to be their property, because they were created out of whole cloth, or at least heavily-obfuscated cloth. Obfuscated enough cloth. They link to a post on the blog Prismatic Wasteland that lists them all out with commentary: Beholder, Gauth, Carrion Crawler, Tanar’ri, Baatezu, Displacer Beast, Githyanki, Githzerai, Mindflayer and its alternate name Illithid, Umber Hulk and Yuan-Ti. These are considered “product identity” monsters, and other products should not use them under penalty of lawsuit. “Tanar’ri” and “Baatezu” are hilarious as identity-monsters, because they were only named that so TSR could excise the words “devil” and “demon” from their game in deference to the 80s Satanic Panic.

I urge you to follow that link too, as it’s an informative read itself. I personally can add that a definition for a Beholder has been in the source code for Nethack since 3.2 (nethackwiki), but is set to never be generated in the game, possibly waiting for an age where its actualization would be less legally fraught. (I’ve included the game info for Beholder at the end of this post.)

So let’s RTS (“ReTurn from Subroutine“) and get back to today’s subject, the Thrilling Tales post. A lot of the monsters mentions got revisions in later Final Fantasy games, and even in remakes of FF1. Even in the NES version if Final Fantasy, the Beholder became the Evil Eye, which is a legally-distinct giant oculus-monster.

FF1J’s Beholder, compared to the Evil Eye from one of the English ports. While it should be recognized that the Evil Eye here has much greater color depth, since it came from a remake, I think the design is generally better. The Beholder’s wide toothy smile isn’t as becoming for an alien eye-creature. (Images are from [ugh] the Fandom Final Fantasy wiki.)

Rather than interrogate their whole post, I think you should just go read it yourself. Go, go! I’ll be here when you get back, just, tomorrow.

nethackwiki’s sidebar for the Beholder, including its source code reference

A Bluesky User Points Out Excellent Indie Adventure Games

It was posted by Francisco González, who laments that people rue the death of the adventure game genre, when, as he says, there are more great adventure games being made now than ever before. Perhaps what we’ve lost is the big publisher, the press that will call attention to them, or maybe just the narrow field of releases that allows single specific games to stand out above a handful of peers. Although I notice that many of these games have positive Eurogamer and Rock Paper Shotgun reviews!

So Francisco posted links to some games that he personally likes. A lot of these games have a pixel art style to them, in ways that purposely evoke the Sierra and Lucasarts games of the 80s and 90s. You can read Francisco’s post on Bluesky. I’ve called out a few below, but encourage you to check the post!

Death of the Reprobate

Death of the Reprobate: An adventure through real Renaissance portraits by John Richardson, creator of comedy adventure games Four Last Things and The Procession to Calvary.

Near-Mage: You play as a student who’s just discovered she’s a witch, and has been sent to study magic in Transylvania. Maybe a bit of a Harry Potter vibe, although with more vampires and less of Rowling’s transphobia. Its description states, “A game about about Transylvania made by Transylvanians!”

PRIM

PRIM: A “cute and creepy” aesthetic suffused this game about a girl who finds out she’s Death’s daughter. Discworld vibes, perhaps?

Rosewater

Francisco’s own Rosewater: A quest for fame across an alternate world version of the old west.

Perfect Tides

Perfect Tides: Set in the year 2000, follow an internet obsessed teen through a year of her life on an island paradise.

Paradigm

Paradigm: A surreal game with bizarre character art, starring a mutant fighting against (adjusts glasses, reads) “a genetically engineered sloth that vomits candy.”

Beyond the Edge of Owlsgard

Beyond the Edge of Owlsgard: Another game set in a world of anthropomorphic animals, the art has a VGA vibe to it and a strong classic Lucasarts vibe.

(And let’s not forget, World of Goo 2 has a change-up last chapter that’s actually an adventure game!)

Sundry Sunday: There’s Something About Pokemon Trading Card Game Pocket

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

I never got into the Pokemon Trading Card Game scene. I never got into Magic either. The thing about trading card games, I’ve always said, sometimes twice in a row even, is they seem more like a business model than a game.

It’s not that they don’t have good design, really, but that the purpose of that game is to make it so that players buy more cards. And despite that, whenever I bring this up among obsessed players, they say it doesn’t take money to win. No, but it makes winning much more likely. More money gets you more cards, and statistically, that means you get better cards. More money means you can outright buy better cards from traders. Money rules all, just like it does in the actual real physical world, and that’s something I play games to escape.

Recently the Pokemon Company released a second app version of their money-printing game. This one promises streamlined rules, and lets you get booster packs without paying cash, although being “free to play,” monetization is sadly a big part of the game.

Word is, it is also infuriatingly difficult to win at, an experience that TerminalMontage, creator of the “Something About” series of animations, captures aptly in their new animation. (8 minutes)

My opinion of the Something About cartoon is scattered. There’s some funny episodes in there, but it also relies a lot on the “earsplitting scream EXPLOSION” gag. It happens at least once in this video. And sometimes it substitutes hyper-energy for actual jokes. Yet, hidden amidst the LOLrandom, the good ones really are good. Will you find this one to be so? There’s but one way to find out.

Abyssoft Explains Smash Melee’s Home Run Contest World Records

The Home Run Contest in Super Smash Bros. is such a unique part of the game. It began in Melee (the second Smash Bros. game, the one on Gamecube) and has reliably returned in each version since then.

In Super Smash Bros.’ normal mechanics, characters attack each other to increase their opponent’s damage percentage. The higher a character’s damage, effectively, the lighter they become, and the easier they are to knock around with strong attacks. The object is to knock the opponent so far away that they leave the arena, either so they fall off the main platform and off the bottom of the screen, or so far to the side or top that they cross a kill line and are defeated.

The standoff: a character, a sandbag, and a bat.

The Home Run Contest is a solo mode where the kill line is removed on the right side of the screen. The arena scrolls infinitely to the right. On a platform on the left edge is a special opponent character, Sandbag-kun, or just Sandbag, who’s just a large cylindrical mass with a couple of eyes. Sandbag has no moves, and mostly just stands there. The aim is, to wrack up as much damage as you can over 10 seconds, then use the strongest attack your character has to knock it to the right. To assist in this, the game hands you a Home Run Bat, the game’s strongest attack item, to send it off with. The distance Sandbag flies is determined by the strength of your attack and the damage you’ve done to it. The game records the highest distance each character has been able to send it, and adds them all together for an overall record.

As is predictable for a game as fussed-over as Smash Melee, over the 26 years since its players have come up with all kinds of ridiculous strategies for flinging it downscreen. Later Smash games would do things like have the sun rise and fall as it spins through the air, but Smash Melee just lets it sail through the sky.

It’s an information-dense 25 minutes, but I’ve cued it up about two and a half minutes in to skip a lengthy intro and ad embed. Here’s the video from the start.